Expectations Hypothesis Tests in the Presence of Model Uncertainty

We extend vector autoregressive (VAR) model based expectations hypothesis tests of the term structure by relaxing some specification assumptions in order to reflect model uncertainty. Firstly, the wild bootstrap is used to allow for conditional heteroskedasticity of unknown form in the VAR residuals. Secondly, the model selection procedure is endogenized in the bootstrap replications and supplemented with a robust multivariate autocorrelation test. Finally, a stationarity correction is introduced to prevent the bias corrected VAR coefficients from becoming explosive. When the new methodology is applied to extensive US term structure data it emerges that the model uncertainty goes a long way in explaining the empirical rejections of the theory.